NOAA released its October outlook for our winter, based on ocean temperatures, and continues to find a 60-65% chance of the appearance of the boychick.
Here's my fave set of graphs today, from another site, and here's my fave single graph:
These are tempeartures taken across a section of the equatorial Pacific, the vast belt across the widest girth of the planet, that the experts consider central for the formation of El Niño.
As you can see, this year is in the red — meaning warmer than usual ocean conditions, which harbingers a warm winter with possibility of wetness for California — but only by a tiny bit.
It's especially small compared to big El Niño years such as 2010 and of course the epochal 1997-1998, a year of catastrophic weather that literally changed the world. Note too that the forecast was well in the red for 2012, a predicted El Niño, which did not develop and left us in drought.
On the other hand, if you look at the depth of blue/cooling over recent years in this indicative region, you see a steadily diminishing. This was the point The New York Times made a month or so ago in a story with a conclusion that struck me as anomalously insightful.
“Even if we don’t see an El Niño, it doesn’t mean California is going to be dry,” [the climatologist] said.
In fact, Mr. Halpert and Mr. Pierce said, one bright spot in the long-range outlook is that with the odds favoring at least a weak El Niño, the opposite weather phenomenon, known as La Niña, is less likely. La Niña occurs when Pacific water is colder than normal, and the result for California could be very dry weather.
“At least when you have a weak El Niño it’s not a La Niña,” Mr. Pierce said. “So that’s some limited good news.”
Impressive to me when a highly changeable news story remains relevant well after the pub date.
Kit Stolz 